San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee looks on during a tour of the new Asian Art Museum exhibit Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy in San Francisco, Calif. on Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2012.

Photo: Stephen Lam, Special To The Chronicle

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee looks on during a tour of the new Asian...

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Mayor Ed Lee announced that his office would push for a first of it's kind ban on "hollow-point" bullets during a press conference held at the SFPD's Special Operations Unit building in San Francisco, CA Thursday December 20th, 2012.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Mayor Ed Lee announced that his office would push for a first of...

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At an election party for the Democratic Party in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee celebrates after President Barack Obama wins a second a second term on Tuesday Nov. 6, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Mike Kepka, The Chronicle

At an election party for the Democratic Party in San Francisco,...

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Mayor Ed Lee is seen in the Hall of Mayors at SF City Hall on Friday, Dec. 28, 2012 in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

Mayor Ed Lee is seen in the Hall of Mayors at SF City Hall on...

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Lee followed up a poorly received proposal for a "stop-and-frisk" policy with a series of less incendiary ideas for cutting down on firearms mayhem.

Mayor Ed Lee was surrounded by an exuberant crowd at Tosca Cafe on election night in November, celebrating the passage of his business tax reform measure, when the numbers came in showing that his estranged appointee to the Board of Supervisors, Christina Olague, was headed toward defeat.

Tech investor Ron Conway, a major backer of the tax proposal who also spent heavily to unseat Olague, began chanting "Recall Ross!" with the crowd, a reference to Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, whom Lee had unsuccessfully tried to oust for misconduct. Lee stood silent at his side, attendees said.

"That is the year in a nutshell right there," said Corey Cook, a political scientist at the University of San Francisco. "People cheering while the mayor's appointee is defeated. There is a certain irony in that."

It was an episode that encapsulated the uneven nature of Lee's first year with a public mandate to lead San Francisco, one that was punctuated by economic advances and breakthroughs on intractable problems but that also contained stumbles and instances of overreach or poor follow-through, some political observers said.

The tech sector is flourishing, the city's unemployment rate - 6.7 percent - is the lowest in four years, construction is booming around Twitter's new headquarters in the perennially downtrodden Mid-Market area, and Lee scored major victories at the ballot box, including two that had eluded his predecessors: creating up to $51 million a year in steady funding for affordable and workforce housing and overhauling the city's business tax while bringing in an additional $28.5 million a year in business fees.

Still, Lee's slipups, including an idea to counter gun violence that was blasted as racial profiling and a failed attempt to oust Mirkarimi, have also been palpable, analysts said.

"There have been some missteps," Cook said. "I think the public is going to rate him like they rate any elected official, as opposed to a year ago, when it was a lovefest."

The Mirkarimi effect

Lee, the former career bureaucrat who was tapped in January 2011 to serve as a one-year caretaker but then ran for and won a full term, acknowledged that the Mirkarimi matter was "one of the low points" of the year.

The mayor took the unusual step of trying to remove the sheriff from office after he pleaded guilty in March to misdemeanor false imprisonment stemming from an argument with his wife in which he grabbed her arm hard enough to bruise it.

Lee, though, made no apologies for trying to remove Mirkarimi as unfit to be sheriff, saying that the "just wrong decision" by four members of the Board of Supervisors to reinstate the sheriff has forced city officials to "work twice as hard on areas like domestic violence."

It didn't help that Olague, who had already bucked the mayor on other votes during her 10 months in office, cast a key vote to reinstate Mirkarimi. One of Lee's backers called Olague's appointment the mayor's "worst decision ever."

Lee's effort to remove Mirkarimi plunged the city into months of tense political drama. Since its failure, the mayor has been showing no willingness to push a time-consuming and expensive recall at the ballot box, saying he needs to focus on housing, job creation, transportation and education.

"The attempt to remove (Mirkarimi) and not being able to do it will still wind up being good politics," said Mark Mosher, a veteran San Francisco political consultant. "Mirkarimi is politically toxic."

But the whole matter - from Lee's fumbling performance on the witness stand during the proceedings to Conway's recall chant - has eroded Lee's image as an apolitical yeoman and raised larger questions about his engagement, follow-through and ability to exert message control over his powerful supporters, some observers said.

Mosher, who worked on Proposition E and gave Lee's team high marks for pulling off that business tax reform measure, agreed somewhat.

"He doesn't necessarily ride herd," Mosher said. "It seems like when the strategy is consensus-building, he is able to get people who would otherwise be at each other's throats to work together. But there are going to be situations where he'll be faced with saying, 'There's not going to be consensus, and I'm just going to fire up the political bulldozer.'... I'm sure there will be a time when some of Ed Lee's closest supporters want something that he doesn't want to give them."

Risk-taker

Lee began 2012 buoyed by a solid victory in his first election since high school. He noted that 2012 was the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese calendar - his sign - and that he was "going to be taking some risks."

Some of those have produced less-than-stellar results.

A deal Lee struck with California Pacific Medical Center on approvals for a $2.5 billion development plan that included two new hospitals was introduced at the Board of Supervisors in April without any co-sponsors after the mayor couldn't line up the six needed for approval. The deal quickly came under fire as inadequate.

Now three supervisors are leading negotiations with officials from the Sutter Health affiliate to rework the deal.

When Lee floated the idea in June of adopting a stop-and-frisk-type policing model that many equate to racial profiling, even his police chief was surprised.

Lee tried to stand firm, saying a bold step was needed after four shootings in four days at the Sunnydale housing projects, and then after a movie theater mass shooting in Aurora, Colo. But he found no backing, and Lee instead decided to have law enforcement focus on a core group of known gang-affiliated or violent offenders by strictly enforcing probation and parole violations, coupled with steps like enhancing clergy involvement and using a new computer system to do "predictive policing."

While some analysts said that was little more than layering unproven technology on top of what police were already supposed to be doing, others gave Lee credit for maneuvering out of a jam.

"He showed a pretty savvy political touch in that he faced serious pushback and modified the program," said David Mark, editor in chief of the Palo Alto-based political news site Politix.

While Lee appears to have suffered few lingering effects from his stop-and-frisk idea, it remains to be seen how he will handle a tumultuous situation at the San Francisco Housing Authority. Three employees, including two of the agency's attorneys, have sued the authority's director, Henry Alvarez, alleging discrimination and retaliation. About 30 other employees have met several times since May with the mayor's top staff to complain about Alvarez's leadership. Alvarez faced similar allegations in previous positions in Oregon and Texas, records show, yet Lee, as city administrator, was one of several people who recommended that the city hire Alvarez.

Solid business results

Still, the mayor has demonstrated an ability to attract and retain businesses while blunting other damaging news.

Over the past year, almost 11 million square feet of commercial space was leased in the city by entities ranging from retailer Uniqlo to tech company Salesforce.com, according to the city's economic development office.

The regatta organizer's decision last year to scuttle the development portion of the America's Cup deal was offset a few months later when the Golden State Warriors announced that they planned to leave Oakland and build a San Francisco waterfront arena at what would have been the site of the sailing team bases, at Piers 30-32. After the 49ers' departure to Silicon Valley became inevitable, San Francisco was announced as a finalist to serve as host city for a Super Bowl that would be played in Santa Clara.

Lee's success in getting voters to approve new money for the city in the form of a parks bond and business fees is also a sign of public trust in his stewardship, his supporters say.

And despite the divisive fight over Mirkarimi's removal, local politics - fought within the dominant Democratic Party - seems to have lost its stark progressive/moderate divide, observers said.

"The interesting thing about the city compared to five years ago is the political atmosphere at the board has lost its rigid composition," said political consultant Jim Stearns, who often works on progressive campaigns. "You have a lot of different ways to get to a majority, and I think Ed Lee is part of that. ... He's shown an interesting capacity to go beyond the comfort zone of his downtown allies and build broader coalitions."

That approach won't change, the mayor said.

"I just think there is even more to be gained by doing consensus-building," Lee said. "I'm promoting an economy that's a sharing economy - that people of all walks of life, different cultures, different economic levels, can participate in. ... In order to do that, you've got to widen the net. You can't have winners and losers."